Footsteps on the Way Home

[Ruth 1:16-17]

Where you go, I will go; and where you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. May Yahweh do so to me, and more also, if anything but death parts you and me.

It seems to me that every day God asks us whom we love, telling us that he loves us more than anything in the world. But we answer that we love the world. He tells us that he is the Creator of the world, and that if we say just one word, that we love him, he will give us everything in the world, yet we keep giving the same answer: that we love the world.

To the Reader

Looking at Ruth, this is what I felt: she had lived without knowing God at all, yet as she heard about God from Naomi she came to realize that he is the living God, and when God asked her, she answered that she loved him.

God loved Naomi and gave her a husband and two sons, but when hardship came, they left God and abandoned Israel. And as she took in foreign women as her daughters-in-law, she seemed to enjoy peace, but there she lost her husband and her two sons, who were God’s true blessing.

To the Reader

Footsteps Toward Home

It was at this moment that God asked Ruth. When he asked her whom she loved, telling her that he loved her, Ruth, unlike Naomi, made the good choice and decision to choose God. Ruth was a foreign woman with no right to become one of God’s people, yet God was comforted by her choice and granted her the privilege of becoming one of his people. This is how different God’s thoughts are from ours

Though Ruth had no right to it, God blessed her so that she became one of the people of Israel, and he did his very best to help that woman become an ancestor of faith. This is the very heart of God

God does not ask much of us. There is nothing we can do for God. Just as God used Ruth as a stepping stone so that Jesus could come to this earth, we simply serve as stepping stones for God’s work of salvation. Ruth became the mother of Israel’s ancestors. If we, living in this age, lean on God’s word as Ruth did and live it out in our lives, God will laugh heartily and bless us, saying that the kingdom of God has grown because of us.

I hope you will remember Ruth’s choice. Because of that woman’s good choice, Israel was able to carry on its line of faith, and in the end her choice became the link through which Jesus came to this earth. As I expounded the Book of Ruth, I came to feel respect for Ruth’s choice and decision.

I hope that you too, like Ruth, will not resent the circumstances and situation you have been given. At her lowest and most painful moment she made a good choice and decision, and God took responsibility for the outcome. I hope you will become a little child who smiles for God and tells him that you love him. And I hope that, like Ruth, you will be approved by God through a full faith. Then God will give you the overflowing blessing of receiving the Boaz, Obed, Jesse and David he has prepared. I thank the believers of Watercourse Church, who became one in heart to make this book, and I thank the deacons of the publishing team, who made time in the midst of their busy lives and did their very best to publish it. Relying on the Word that tells us to spread the gospel to Samaria and to the uttermost parts of the earth, I offer this book.

May 2018
Cho Chun-sook, Pastor of Watercourse Church